[dang]

I appreciate your caring about the quality of HN! With users who care, we can hopefully survive.

There's a fat but fuzzy area in the Venn diagram where these things overlap - for example some stories are both intellectually interesting and have a political dimension. Those stories, or at least some of them, can still be on topic for HN. Opinions inevitably differ about which ones belong vs. which ones should be excluded.

Lots of past explanation about how we think about this, if you or anyone is interested, can be found here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so....

The feeling that HN has changed significantly in recent months or even recent years is often due to random (or maybe seasonal) fluctuations. It usually reverts back. For example, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869.